StatCounter

Pages

Friday, 26 June 2015

Average speed cameras to blight the life of many Londoners

One of my early pieces on this blog was about the new cameras appearing on the A406 that I thought could become average speed cameras. They didn't but anyone travelling along some of London's main roads will have noticed new gantries and cameras appearing. These are for a new average speed camera system that will soon infest four trial sites and then no doubt spread their revenue raising way across the capital.

The first four road sections to be blighted are the A406 (North Circular Road) from the Hanger Lane Gyratory to Bounds Green Road; the A40 from the Polish War Memorial to the Paddington slip road, the A2 from Black Prince
to Tunnel Avenue and the A316 from the M3 to the Hogarth roundabout.

The claim from Transport for London (TfL) is that these are to eradicate accidents at gaps between existing, but obsolete spot speed cameras. But the reality is that they are to a) raise revenue and b) victimise drivers who realise that the 40mph speed limit on most of these roads is set far too low for the quality of the roads.

A report to TfL’s finance policy committee, which approved
the spending on the trial, said members had “concerns about the public
acceptability” of the new cameras.I bet they have.

In France there would be riots, I'm not suggesting that we go down that route but the motorist needs to fight back somehow. Any suggestions?

I favour a drive slow when 20 motorists in each direction on each section on the same day all drive at 4mph preceded by a man with a red flag, for that is what the anti-car zealots would like us to return to, after all it would reduce traffic accidents for as well know, 'Speed Kills'. Except it doesn't...

"A
DfT strategy paper claimed speed was "a major contributory factor in
about a third of all road accidents". The "excessive and inappropriate
speed" that helped "to kill about 1,200 people" each year was "far more
than any other single contributor to casualties on our roads". The
source given for this claim, to be repeated as a mantra by ministers and
officials for years to come, was a report from the government's
Transport Research Laboratory, TRL Report 323: "A new system for
recording contributory factors in road accidents". Not many people would
have looked at this report, since it was only available for £45. But
some who did were amazed. The evidence the report had cited to support
its claim that speed was "a major contributory factor in about a third
of all road accidents" simply wasn't there. Many other factors were
named as contributing to road accidents, from driving without due care
and attention to the influence of drink; from poor overtaking to nodding
off at the wheel. But the figure given for accidents in which the main
causative factor was "excessive speed" was way down the list, at only
7.3 per cent."

Do read the whole of that piece but this extract might also prove interesting:

"The
statistics for Durham showed that, of 1,900 collisions each year, only
three per cent involved cars that were exceeding the speed limit, just
60 accidents a year. Look more closely at the causes of these 60
accidents, the "actual cause of the accident invariably is drink-driving
or drug-driving". Drug-taking was now involved in 40 per cent of
Durham's fatal road accidents. Many accidents, he said, were caused by
fatigue, although one of the most common causes was the failure of
drivers to watch out for oncoming vehicles when turning right. To none
of these could speed cameras offer any remedy. "The cause of accidents,"
Garvin (chief constable of Durham) concluded, "is clearly something
different from exceeding the speed limit"."

Also

"In
September 2006, the DfT finally conceded one of the central points that
Safe Speed's Paul Smith had been arguing for five years: that only five
per cent of road accidents were caused by drivers who were breaking the
speed limit. In The Daily Telegraph, Smith was quoted as saying "the
government's case for continuing to install cameras has been
destroyed"."

So the truth is that speed cameras do
not make the roads safer, are not needed and are being used to raise
revenue - who would have thought it?

Where in the World - visitors since 16 May 2009

Copyright Information

All articles on this web site are copywrited by the author.

Some of the images and video on thus web site have been created by the author, others come from friends, public domain files, are used with permission, embedded from the original web site, or are legally displayable thumbnails. The author gives full permission to anyone to use anything from this site however they wish, as long as the items are not altered in order to deceive others or change their meaning, and they are attributed to the author or this web site.